


Home Is Always Family

by ladyoneill



Series: Lady O's Teen Wolf Bingo Stories [103]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Prostitution, Young Derek Hale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 01:24:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3099821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoneill/pseuds/ladyoneill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer in New York is miserable.  Derek misses his family, his pack, and clings to  the only one left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Is Always Family

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Hurt/Comfort Bingo prompt: homesickness, and as a sequel to the previous ficlet, though can be read as a stand-alone.

It's not Beacon Hills that he misses, nor the house he spent his first sixteen years in.

It's his family. His pack.

Laura refuses to speak of them. All her focus is on keeping the two of them alive and safe. On arriving in New York she spent her nights earning enough money to buy them false identities and move them from the fourth flop house they'd holed up in to a one room apartment.

(In his gut Derek knows what she did to earn the money, but that's another thing they never talk about.)

With a new identity she's able to get a couple legitimate jobs--barista at a local coffee house during the day, waitress at a shady club at night--and makes enough to keep them fed and clothed with a roof over their heads, even if the food is cheap, processed, and laden with chemicals, and the clothes are from thrift stores. There are still days they go hungry or stifle their pride enough to line up at a soup kitchen or food pantry. 

Derek wants to work--he's even prepared to sell himself because his body, his looks, are worthless to him--but Laura refuses and demands he go to school. It's the one thing Derek remains stubborn about until she finally allows him to study at home for the GED and get a job bussing tables at a greasy diner. One of the few benefits is a free meal every evening.

Not wanting anything for himself, he turns over all his meager, under-the-table, wages to his Alpha.

Summer comes to New York City, hot and steamy, and when they're not working, they spend their time wearing very little and stretched out in front of a fan, the one window in their apartment covered with a thick blanket to block out the sun.

Derek is miserable, his mind drifting to the cool forest, light rains filling the streams, dappled sunlight making dew sparkle in early mornings. Far enough north in California, in the hills, the temperature rarely rises to ninety degrees, and the mornings and nights are cool.

He took it all for granted. Winds that didn't burn and stink, sun that rarely came out from behind puffy clouds, rain that cooled heated skin.

The forest and the lake and the laughter of his siblings and cousins.

The light touch of his mother's hand on the back of his neck, her lips brushing his forehead each night before bed.

It's nearly time to get ready for work but neither Derek nor Laura wants to stir from the sheet spread on the thin mattress they share when Laura's phone rings--they both have burners, ones she replaces every four to six weeks, and she makes Derek keep his on and on him, memorizing his new number each time as she makes him learn hers. They're never written down, but out of necessity, their workplaces know them.

And one other.

Laura gropes for the phone, looks at the screen, and her face and eyes empties of emotion before she answers it.

Despite the heat in the room, Derek goes cold.

Her bosses calling wouldn't wipe her face clean like that.

It's a call they've both been waiting for. The bond has dwindled to basically nothing and, reaching out, Derek can't feel him any more.

His heart stutters in his chest and he sits up, turning to stare at Laura standing tall and straight, covered in sweat, wearing only a tank top and panties but more the Alpha now than he's ever seen her.

Only when her shoulders sag and her eyes slide from crimson to brown, does he feel her relief and let his own out.

Hanging up, she tells him that Peter's still alive but has gone deeper into the catatonia. The doctors asked her permission to move him into long-term care because they're pretty sure he won't recover.

Derek wants to go home. For the last year, even before the destruction of his pack, (all his fault) he's hated Beacon Hills for taking Paige from him, for bringing Kate into his life, for being a small town he just wanted to grow out of. But, now, he wants so desperately to go home, go to Peter, try...anything to bring him back, because, even if he's been ignoring the bond between them, it's gone now, leaving one more hole in his heart.

Laura refuses, lists all the dangers, states over and over that Peter is safer with them on the other side of the country. His insurance will keep him cared for. Satomi's pack, the one so far off the radar Derek had never even heard of it until a few months ago when he expressed concern for Peter in his helplessness, will protect him. The hunters are gone from Beacon Hills, but they don't dare bring them back down on Peter's head.

For the second time, he tries to defy her, convince her she's wrong, until her eyes blaze again and he curls into a ball, shaking.

Wrapping herself around him, despite the heat and the sweat and the stink, Laura rocks him and murmurs to him, until all Derek can do is whimper like a cub that he wants to go home.

Laura's 'this is our home now, Derek' only makes him cling to her and start to cry.

End


End file.
